[License-review] CC0 incompliant with OSD on patents, [was: MXM compared to CC0 ]

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

Frankly Carlo, it strikes me as sour grapes with you constantly bringing
up MXM.  Approval of new general purpose open source licenses should
probably consider/require explicit patent grants.  However, special
purpose licenses in the past have specifically limited patent grants and
received OSI approval.

Folks appear to be forgetting that CC0 is first a public domain COPYRIGHT
dedication with a permissive fallback.  As such, it's another special
purpose license that fills a need within the community (PD dedication) not
met by another approved license.

In many countries I would imagine that the fallback would not come into
play.  In which case you still only have copyright rights unless public
domain copyright dedications automatically come with trademark and patent
rights bundled together.

Note that the ODC PDDL also only dedicates copyright and data rights to
the public domain and not trademarks or patents.

I'm going disagree with folks regarding deprecating licenses without
explicit patent grants.  If the OSI is dumb enough to deprecate the BSD
license I'll go ahead and deprecate the OSI as having lost touch with the
community and I don't think I'll be alone in doing so.


On 3/6/12 4:15 AM, "Carlo Piana" <osi-review at piana.eu> wrote:

>Thus, to me, the only discrimen to decide whether this license is to be
>approved is to decide whether, as Brendan has put it clearly, if the OSD
>relates to all the rights the licensor controls or to copyright only.
>This is the objection I received when I proposed the MXM and that
>convinced me.